I am normally not one to think about my single status. Not that I don’t want to be in a relationship or that I am actively avoiding it but in general it just does not cross my mind. It’s just kind of like it’s there. It’s a fact about me that I am sporting that single statue and it does not bother me for the most part. I typically get on with my day just fine without a partner. But one of the times that I am the most aware of my single status is when I want to go to a concert. A concert that no one else in my life wants to go to. And all of a sudden, I wish that I had someone in my life that I can force this experience upon. But that is because, the role that music plays in my life…. is different compared to most. Almost freakish.

It’s not just the sound. It’s the experience as a whole. The feeling of the music pulsing through your body and it’s almost like your very blood comes alive. The bass throwing itself into your nerves, jolting your bones with ever beat. The hairs on your arms stand up and you can almost feel your pupils dilating. The way I’m describing my general concert experience right now, it may sounds like what happens to you when you get into a very lively club, which it sometimes true to some extent. But a concert to me at least is a whole different ballpark. For the most part, I will only go to concerts where I am devoted to the artist. And not to oversell the value, but having completely devotion to an artist is a big deal for me. Deal breaker quality stuff. It typically means that I had a connect to the music. And as I am writing that sentence, I know just how it sounds pretty fake on paper, I know but for me it’s the most real that I personally can get. There is a place/moment that I get to when I literally lose myself in music. (que Lose Yourself by Eminem) It’s almost like an out of body experience. I feel real and alive and strangely protected. Like I’m in my own sphere of sound and all that matters is me in that moment, listening to that music in this specific time of my life. I move, I dance, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this part, I fully throw myself into experience. So long story short, concerts are some of my favorite experiences of all time.

My only problem is that a combination of my strange taste in more unpopular music and my standards of seating (I will pay more than most of my friends for pretty terrible seats because the sound is all that matters to me, not always necessarily seeing the performer in question. Although that is fun too I’ve heard.) I normally have a difficult time finding someone to go with me. I have gone to concerts alone before (read the post about my first and currently last trip in a police car for an example) but it’s not always as fun. I also realize that my description of myself at the concert and what I go through out the show overall would make it seem that I would actually prefer to go to the shows by myself. And it also seems that normal people would not necessarily want to stand too close by me during a concert, even friends that I know and people that care about me. While both are true to some extent, I cannot help my fear of going alone. It’s human nature right? Or is it because I’m a girl and I partially worry about my safety. Part of my mind is constantly aware of my surroundings and I’m not able to fully put myself into the show itself. But in reality, if I’m going to honest with myself, it’s not just the companionship but the actual presence. The need to share the experience. Music should be shared….. but also and mostly the fear of being judged when seen going to a show by one’s self. How duplicitous is that statement from someone who just explain the impact that music has on her. Why should I care so much about going alone? What does that say about me as a person? A literal “losing of myself, in the music”.

My Family is very close. That is an important preface to this story. My parents work together in a flower shop so they literally see each other 24/7 and have done so for more than two decades. My brother and I weren’t always close (especially during high school when actually WWIII was happening sometimes) but have forced our sibling relationship over the past few years, especially when we discovered that we actually have a lot more in common as adults (funny how that works out, huh?). Mom and I text mainly in GIFS, Memes, and BitMojis to the point that we simultaneously understand and don’t understand each other. My brother has more than once followed my dad to the bathroom if he’s not finished tell him about his day and my dad takes it and continues to listen. And on that note, my parents have an open-door bathroom policy and always have for as long as I could remember. When anything happens to me, be it good or bad, they are always 100% the first people I tell. In the shower, when hold my shampoo bottles and pretend to be winning a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical, they are always the longest and most emotional part of my fake acceptance speech. We are a close family. We tell each other everything. At least most of the time.

There are rare times where just one of us will leave on a trip for a long period of time. The two biggest ones are both when my mom went back to Korea to visit her family. She was gone for a few weeks at a time, leaving Dad, my brother and me to fend for ourselves for a little. This should not have been a problem. However, the first time mom left up to go to Korea, I was in 6 grade. 3 major things happened while she was gone. One, I discovered a new pass time where I would pick at my freckles until they bled, because I wanted to see how deep the pigment went. Two, my brother broke his collarbone playing football with some of the other neighborhood kids. Three, dad bought a boat. Apparently, we completely fell apart without Mom.

So when she needed to leave the three of us alone again to go to Korea just a few years ago, it’s fair to say that she was pretty terrified even though this was more than a 11 years later and now everyone was legally an adult. The worry was real however and it was almost to the point where she didn’t actually want to leave. When we finally convinced her to go, she made sure to track each of all individually and give us a specific request. To me she said, “Please do make any changes to your body”, to my brother “please don’t hurt yourself”, and to my dad “please don’t be in possession of a motorcycle when I get back.” After a little vacation adventure a few months previous where we rode scooters down Red Rock, Dad rediscovered his love for riding choppers. Something he used to do all the time, until he met my mother and was lightly suggested that he doesn’t actually like them. He gladly gave it up for the love of his life, but 26 years into marriage, he figures that she’s probably stuck with him by this point so why not test those waters again. Mom gave him a pretty firm no and made sure to put her foot down again before she left the country for a few day. The night before her departure, we all made our individual promises with smiles and sincere nods. My poor mother.

She is on that plane for less than half an hour before I have to pick my brother up from work because he accidently used hydrogen peroxide instead of contact solution and got chemical burns on his eyes. We stop by the flower shop to tell dad and wait out the time before going to the eye doctor when he says the horrible words I wasn’t even surprised to hear. “Don’t tell mom yet… but I got the motorcycle.” Before we can really react ,Dad is going on and on about how his friend gave it to him his old one for free so she at least wouldn’t be mad about the money, yada yada yada…while I on the other hand was secretly distracted by a little secret of my own and it only forced it’s way up to the surface after Dad’s little confession. And now I finally saw my opportunity to get away with it. He looked at me almost expectantly because I’m the loud smart mouth of the family that likes to rub it in people’s faces when they get things wrong or when they mess up. I’m also the naturally the class tattletale, when it comes to my mother. What he was not expecting was for me to blurt out a confession I had been holding in for almost a week. I had done the one thing in my life that my parents had explicitly forbidden me to do multiple times but I had taken the risk anyway. “I got a tattoo.” The word came out one of my mouth before I could stop them. Everything gets silent. Dad looks angry at first but then stops. “Well…I’m really in no position to start judging or be mad.” My brother just looks at the three of us at a whole and asks then question we are all thinking: “When do we tell Mom?”

We had a 3/4 family meeting and decided to take the cowards way out and call her while she was still in Korea so that at least he was on the other side of the country and also so there were a few weeks for her to cool off before we actually were face-to-face with her again. That phone call….was not the best phone call to say the least. But in the end, it did not matter. Mom gave us the silent treatment for a little bit (which was impressive since she was more than 7,000 miles away and we could still feel it in our house) but we are still family. We bicker and squabble and silently judge each other. But we are still the family that is super close, that does everything together and apparently, that tends to really screw things up together too.

Disclaimer: I do agree of some of the states that are going to be made and I disagree with other but none of that really matters towards the conclusion of this post. Also, I am aware that these are not universal truths but at some point they show how society, be it past or present, has interpreted at one point or another. A women stripping for money is considered unacceptable. Cursing in front of children (both on purpose and on accident) is considered unacceptable. Any form of picking your nose, farting or spitting in public is considered unacceptable. Sneezing without covering your mouth is rude, sneezing without covering your mouth directly at another person is worse and if this person is a stranger, this behavior is completely and beyond unacceptable. Eating food that fell on the floor is gross, eating food that fell on the sidewalk is disgusting, and eating food that fell in the trashcan is unacceptable. Eating a banana very slowly in public is culturally not accepted and talking about castration around anyone with a penis is unacceptable. Wearing authentic fur in a pet shop is just wrong on many levels. When women wear tight skirts, or really short bottoms or shirts that show cleavage, it’s very frowned upon. For certain religions, marrying outside the sect is not always presented as an option. On those lines, breaking religious codes (be it the 10 commandments from the Bible or the Torah) are considered sins that can lead to eternal damnation. Talking on your phone during a movie is beyond all senses of the word unacceptable. Putting children on leashes at Disney World is unacceptable parenting. A woman feeding her baby in public has been called disgusting by more than one person.

HOWEVER. What I learned quite recently is that when a person goes deer hunting, apparently to see how close a deer might be, one must get up close and personal with the deer’s droppings. Not by sight, Not by smell, Not by touch, but by taste. Yes, you read that correctly. BY TASTE. And for some reason that is acceptable. THAT IS ACTALLY ACCEPTABLE. Did you read that as me yelling. Good. Because I was yelling. I said that exact phrase when I learned about this but with an exclamation point and question mark at the end rather than a period. I am not a hunter, and I have never been hunting. I am a Vegetarian (that, for the record and to be completely honest, eats fish and other seafood on occasion) so I never plan on hunting. I do not like the idea of hunting but to put myself out there, I also do not feel that it is right or even my place to say that nobody should be allow hunt ever. But I NEVER will think it is okay, unless it somehow saves your life, to put another creature’s feces in your mouth. So tell me society, how did we get here?

Here is the thing. Shit Happens. Forest Gump said it first but I’m here to say it second. Shit Happens. When life gives you lemons, it also finds a way to crap all over you in one way or another. Now, I don’t want to be a pessimist, because life is generally really nice. And good. And fun. But more often than you would like, life takes a turn for the worst. And sometimes really bad things happen to really good people for no reason. I would like to believe in karma, but it doesn’t always work out in my favor. So I have settled on a new theory. Shit Happens. One time, Shit Happened to me. Literally. Like, I sat in someone else’s shit while waiting at the airport. I typically try my hardest to never go to public restrooms (and for really good reason too), but when your bladder is about to explode and you are at that age where is it considered “socially unacceptable” to pee yourself in public, there are very little options. Another thing I try really hard not to do is fully sit down on the toilet seat in a public restroom. That is a no brainier. I’m not judgy if anyone else does it, I just prefer not to. So tell me, how in this combination of behaviors, I manage to sit in crap? Because apparently number 1, there are kids who lie to their parents about being potty trained or number 2, adults manage to still miss the toilet seat when going number 2 and refuse to clean up after themselves. Also recall that I do not fully sit down, so you can image just how high this particular pile was. And then the public restroom toilet seat was almost the exact same color of the shit. It was a perfect storm. You are probably asking yourself, how did this girl not see the shit? Well, when you try to hold in your pee as long as possible so you don’t have to go in a public restroom, you tend to not notice your surroundings when you are in a rush to relieve yourself. Also, in this situation how am I anything but the victim (how dare you?!).

So what do you do when you sit in someone else’s shit? Well, first you have a moment of confusion, then a moment of denial, a moment of panic, a moment of horror, a moment of disgust and then finally a moment where you realize the irony of literal shit happening to you. You run to the sink and scrub furious at the back of your leg with soap and water, ignoring the stares you get for other women who did not sit in shit and are silent judging you. You rub your skin until it is beyond red and raw. Then you run to the first gift store you see and buy an absurd amount of hand sanitizer and rub it all over your body. Not just your contaminated leg but your other leg and your arms too. You slather that stuff on like its lotion. Again, people who did not sit in someone else’s feces will stare at you. But it’s okay because you barely notice them. When you finally board the plane, the attendant who takes your ticket will causally sniff the air and give you a weird look that seems to say “Why do you smell like Ethanol?” And you smile back and board the plane while your die a little on the inside because you re-lived the experience. You tell yourself, one day you will laugh about this. One day, this will be one of those insane stories you will tell at parties. One day, this moment will just be a blip in your experiences in life. You will gradually find it comical, you will eventually go even hours without it bubbling back into your head and you might even tell a friend or two that it actually happened without terribly cringing. But here is the thing, you will never completely forget the experience, even months later. No matter how hard you try. Because the real hard cold truth is, that shit will stay with you forever.

My dreams do this funnily ironic thing… where they never end they way that I expect them to. In most people’s dreams, they can fly if they want to. They can imagine plates of their favorite food appear in piles at their feet. They can be successful millionaires married to their favorite celebrities. However in my dreams, I always get so close to the goal but never reach it. Before I got my first dog, I used to dream about getting a dog all of the time. But I never got the dog, I would ALWAYS wake up before the dog actually showed up.

Or, (and I have had this dream so frequently) I’ll be going to vacation and I’ll spend the entire dream packing but wake up before I even get there. I cannot once recall a dream where I get any actual closure. What does that even mean? I honestly feel sometimes that it’s my subconscious keeping me in track with reality. It’s like my theoretical third, strict, disciple-parent that I never got along with. It lets me play around with the idea of having fun but the moment I get too far if grabs me by the shoulder and goes “Oh no no no. This is as far as you get.” I have also thought it could be my pessimistic side coming out. I like to think of myself as a relatively optimistic person but I definitely do still have a pessimist inside of me. So when me and my optimism goes to sleep, Mr. Pessimist comes out and likes to remind me over and over again that none of my dreams are coming true. That’s pretty harsh. (That why he lives in the dungeon of my mind palace. ) Either way, I am confused. Why does it happen so consistently? What does it say about me as a person? Am I one of those people who will never accomplice my wildest dreams? Cause that really puts a dent in my plans.

I am not a sports person. I tried to be. I have an older brother who entire life is sports. He has gone over rules, stats, players, even team mascots but I am utterly useless. No matter what I tried, I could not retain any of it. Probably because I am unfortunately one of those terrible people… who just doesn’t like sports. I did have a thing for hockey for a very short time in my life after I watched the Mighty Ducks movie. But that ended quickly after the third movie ruin the franchise. In short, I never got into sports and thus didn’t know any of the rule for anything ever. Which is what make the story of the brief time in my life when I got a part time job as a intramural sports referee all the more interesting. I have mentioned before that I had almost every typical job that every person had while they were at college. One of those jobs came from an ad in the school paper looking for student referees. The orientation made it all look so easy. We had a choice between softball and flag football. Remember how I said that I know nothing about sports? I ended up picking flag football because I thought that would be easier (seriously, I DO NOT get sports). Ignorance is not always bliss. One that first day, they gave us all a rundown of the rules and to this day, I still do not fully understand them. So on the one and only day I was a referee, I mixed up the two teams, made two really wrong calls, got yelled at repeatedly by both side and then by the end, I’m pretty sure I was just making stuff up (“You strike out!” stuff like that). It got so bad, they ended up switching me over to the ultimate Frisbee side, a spot usually reserved for the older kids who have earned an easy night. You see, while the whole flag football thing was happening, on the other side of the field, there was a series of ultimate Frisbee games going on and only one ref was needed to monitor them because it was “super easy”. This is how it was explained to me: whoever got the Frisbee to the other side gets the point. Simple enough. But the person who explained this to me forgot to mention that the teams switch sides after every play (or was it every quarter… seriously, I don’t know anything). In her defense, every college student really should know the rules to ultimate Frisbee. It’s basically mandatory and will eventually be part of the SATs. But in my defense, I just got taken off refereeing flag football because I tried to tell a person not to block the goalie. And it wasn’t like anyone was wearing uniforms, so I didn’t know who was on whose team. At least the Frisbee guys were nicer. There was more “Excuse me Miss Ref. I think you gave the other team our point” instead of “What the Hell Ref?! Are you blind?!” that I got from the flag footballer (I almost responded “Yes, I am actually partially blind” just to get them off my back but I knew karma would really get be for that one). So at the end of the day I wasn’t just done, I was finished. Completely wiped out physically and mentally. I left that job the next day (probably to cheers from my co-workers) and never looked back, decided that something just weren’t worth the money. But I do wish sometimes I would have stuck by it. Then I could actually know things. It’s not too late for me though, I can still learn. Just this time… I’ll learn from off of the field.

I have taken to calling this month HypochonJuly due to the fact that I have decided to see 4 different doctors/specialists within a 9 day span. So I have decided to do this for a few different reason. 1) I am trying to take as little PTO days to do this so I scheduled appointments back to back 2) I finally have real people insurance and am very overdue for most of these 3) I have this constant nagging feeling in the back of my head that I am dying of some rare disease. So I don’t want to say that I have hypochondria because I don’t. At least I haven’t been clinically diagnosed but also, could a person who put off her annual checkup with her family doctor for 4 years really be considered a hypochondriac?? I don’t think so.

At the same time though, I would be lying if I said that I can’t watch the health part of the news anymore because every time a disease is brought up, I tend to think I have already caught it. And I tend to jump to the craziest conclusions when the littlest thing happens to my body. Like when I feel a tooth hurt a little bit and think I need a root canal. Or when my throat is sore and puffy and I think that my tonsils need to be drained of fluid. Or when wake up one morning with my eye stinging and think that I have an eye ulcer. Oh wait. All three of those things ACTUALLY happened to me. It’s crazy I know. WebMD is made fun of for making people misdiagnose themselves to something much more serious but it’s been right with me about 90% of the time. And because of these and many other hospital adventures, it probably why I am the way I am. I am so prone to the most obscure brands of illness and now I always assume the worse if coming. Which is not a bad way to prepare for the zombie apocalypse but I already packed my survival bag months ago and waiting around for it to just happen got too boring. Either way, I am now going to be poked and prodded by many a doctor and am prepared to be told that either nothing is wrong with me or everything is wrong everything. No matter what, I am prepared and mentally ready. So in conclusion, no I am not the traditional kind of hypochondria, I am my own kind. The one that suspects because it’s most likely true. The one that goes above and beyond because it’s actually necessary. The one that is never surprised at the doctor’s office. I never say “Really? I had no idea.” I tend to say ” Yeah, that sounds about right.” which just makes it easier on everyone involved in the situation at the end. Cause no matter what, surprises in life may be nice, but expectation of the worst has definitely kept me from having some potentially really horrible days. It’s all about perceptive and paranoia. The foundation to keeping you in check for the unexpected which I feel everyone can use a little more of in their life anyways.